[Jay Ambrose] The North Korean threat

Susan Rice, national security advisor to President Barack Obama, recently said the United States could live with a nuclear regime in North Korea but failed to answer an important question. For how long?After all, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, weird of appearance, weird of mind and downright murderous when it comes to eliminating fellow officials and relatives he does not trust, has said he just may wipe out America someday.To kill time until he tried, a bullying, nuclear-endowed North Korea w

Aug. 20, 2017

[Jonathan Bernstein] Trump can’t rebound until Bannon, Kushner fired

In the wake of the events in Charlottesville and the president’s reaction, some activists, including conservatives, are renewing their focus on removing Steve Bannon from the White House. Their reasons are familiar by now: He represents the “nationalist” wing of the administration most closely tied to this weekend’s violence and once bragged that his Breitbart.com was the “platform for the alt-right.” It seems like an easy call, but Maggie Haberman at the New York Times is offering a note of cau

Aug. 18, 2017

[Russell Korobkin] Madness could finally end this crisis

Donald Trump is a narcissistic, short-tempered, uninformed, unpredictable bully. In almost every context, this combination of traits is exactly what you would not want in a president of the United States. But one exception might be in dealing with Kim Jong-un and North Korea.As I tell students in my negotiation class, in hard-nosed, brass-knuckles bargaining, the crazy person wins because he forces a rational counterpart to make concessions in order to avoid mutual disaster. And no one does craz

Aug. 17, 2017

[Mihir Sharma] Why bother asking Trump to condemn Nazis?

Briefly, before he went wildly off-script on Tuesday at Trump Tower, we lived in a world where the 45th president of the United States had finally managed to condemn Nazis. And let’s ask ourselves: Did that make us feel any better? Did the sight of Donald J. Trump glumly reading off a teleprompter remarks obviously written by someone else convince anyone that he understood his earlier error? Did we all begin to feel that America and the world were in safe hands?Well, no, of course not.Nobody in

Aug. 17, 2017

[John M. Crisp] North Korea crisis calls for a feminine touch

Last week I pulled my attention away from the North Korea crisis -- more on that later -- to consider the memo that got software engineer James Damore fired from Google.Damore was trying to account for the lack of gender diversity at Google, whose tech employees are 80 percent male. He admits the existence of broad cultural biases, but he got in trouble for attributing some of the gender imbalance to essential genetic differences between males and females.While Damore concedes many exceptions an

Aug. 17, 2017

[Katharine H.S. Moon] Can S. Korea save the day?

As North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump’s war of words escalates, National Liberation Day celebrations -- commemorating the Korean Peninsula’s 1945 freedom from Japanese colonial rule -- have unfolded in both North and South Korea. The occasion underscores not just the shared history between the two countries, but also the South’s unique qualifications to bring about a peaceful resolution to the current military standoff.As much as Kim may enjoy threatening the most po

Aug. 16, 2017

[Daniel Moss] Japan’s booming -- now it needs more immigrants

Japan has served its time as a symbol of economic failure. Its latest growth surge puts it in a welcome new role.The country’s demographics, according to conventional wisdom, are supposed to be bad for the economy. Instead, Japan unexpectedly shot to the top of Group of Seven club, with its gross domestic product notching 4 percent annual growth last quarter. That easily outpaced the 2.6 percent recorded in the US during the same period.The biggest gains were in consumption and business spending

Aug. 16, 2017

[Dan K. Thomasson] Loudmouth Trump putting world at risk

What ever happened to Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition to “speak softly and carry a big stick”? Oh, that’s right, Donald Trump doesn’t spend much time studying history -- or anything else.Granted, things have changed more than a bit since the hero of San Juan Hill sat in the Oval Office. These days, the big stick has a nuclear tip, and the stakes are much higher.But President Trump’s gone and broken the foreign policy mold set by his predecessors by provoking North Korean leadership into threats

Aug. 16, 2017

[Minxin Pei] China’s ‘double-freeze’ con

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un says the United States will pay a “thousandfold for all the heinous crimes” it has committed against his country. US President Donald Trump warns that North Korea will experience “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Kim threatens to fire four missiles at the US territory of Guam. Trump promises that Kim “will truly regret it” and “regret it fast” if he follows through on that threat, or issues another.As the unprecedented exchange of white-hot rhetoric

Aug. 15, 2017

[James Gibney] The new world order is leaving the US behind

Of all the global consequences of President Donald Trump’s first half-year, surely one of the most surprising is the rise in multilateral diplomacy.After all, this is the guy who came into office pledging to put “America First.” He downgraded the security guarantees of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to a definite maybe -- and only if its members ponied up more defense dollars. The Iran nuclear pact was “the worst deal ever,” and the Paris accord on climate change wasn’t much better. The

Aug. 15, 2017

[Susan Southard] Nuclear terror, still a threat after 72 years

This week marked the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. At 11:02 a.m. Aug. 9, 1945, a five-ton plutonium bomb exploded around 530 meters above the city. Its blast winds tore through the city at 21/2 times the speed of a category five hurricane.Two-year-old Masao Tomonaga was asleep in his home while his mother worked in another room. Within seconds of the blast, their house imploded on top of them. Remarkably, both survived. At 2.73 meters from the bomb’s hypocenter, they were o

Aug. 15, 2017

[Bloomberg] Don’t play North Korea’s game

Immediately after a notable diplomatic win -- unanimous backing at the United Nations for tougher sanctions against North Korea -- President Donald Trump undid much of the benefit by exchanging useless threats of nuclear annihilation with the rogue regime. Instead of playing North Korea’s game of reckless propaganda, Trump should be quietly piling on the pressure while showing more clearly that he’s willing to talk.The president’s threat to rain down “fire and fury” on the North doesn’t change t

Aug. 14, 2017